Welfare Maximization in Nonconvex Rate Utility Problem of Multimedia e-Communication Systems

The coexistence of multimedia services in e-communication systems, with varying bandwidth utilization characteristics, impedes the efficiency of rate control and thereby impacts on the Quality of Service (QoS), in terms of low throughput. As such, the rate control for multimedia flows remains an open problem. This paper proposes a memetic optimization approach to rate allocation of multiclass services where the objective is to maximize the aggregate utility of heterogeneous sources over their transmission rates. The link and sources are viewed as processors of distributed computation and the control mechanism is derived as a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) algorithm, with the objective of achieving fast convergence as well as accuracy. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed rate allocation, in terms maintaining QoS for multiclass services, and validate its scalability and accuracy for large scale flows.